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May 2016 HRMonthly 31
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hrmonline.com.au
COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE
leaders, says KPMG’s national managing partner of people,
performance & culture, Susan Ferrier.
“That cannot be created overnight. The team needs to
understand each other at a personal level. It is more than
just getting to know each other. It needs to be deliberate and
open-hearted, which isn’t easy, especially for virtual teams.
“I have seen a team where the members have all done
individual self-examination and coaching to understand
themselves better. Then they came together as a group, with
a talented facilitator who was a psychologist, to elevate the
performance of the team. Their collaborative outcomes were
palpable, visible and noted by the team itself and people who
worked with them ... this stuff works!” says Ferrier.
Whelan says today’s leaders need to let teams explore
different ways of working and solving problems. Some of the
corporate think tanks and innovation labs that pop up, she
thinks are “putting the cart before the horse” by failing to give
individuals the skills to work well in diverse teams.
A gap remains in understanding how all of this works in the
real world. “It is very hard to measure,” she says.
“But my sense is that the more dynamic and deconstructed
the modern work environment gets, the more important social
intelligence is going to be. Early research findings cer tainly
suggest that, but we’re still looking for a way to systematise it,
to make it replicable ... People want to see the data.”
Dr Jennifer Whelan, founder of Psynapse will be speaking at
the 2016 AHRI Inclusion and Diversity conference on May 13
ATLASSIAN’S TEAM AUDIT
Co-founders of Australian software firm Atlassian, Mike
Cannon-Brookes and Scott Fa rquhar recently explained why
they conducted an audit into the diversity of their teams.
“Diverse and inclusive teams drive innovation a nd greater
individual and team performance. We know that intuitively and
the research backs it up.”
The aim was to discover weaknesses as well as strengths, to
be transparent and to observe how well people from different
backgrounds and cultures interact and work together. While
other companies have trodden a similar path, unusually,
Atlassian chose to make their findings public.
They broke down departments by the number of teams
in each and counted how many women, employees over 40,
African Americans and Latin/Hispanic employees were in each.
“An increase in representation doesn’t necessarily mean an
increase in diversity. That’s a critical distinction to make. If
diversity is concentrated in a few teams, we’re unlikely to realise
the benefits,” noted Cannon-Brookes and Fa rquhar.
The results showed Atlassian was having mixed success; so
the firm changed the way it recruits, partnering with outside
organisations to source new talent and sta ndardising interview
processes. They also offered training on unconscious bias. It’s
work in progress, the company admits, but improvements have
been achieved, doubling the number of Africa n American and
Hispanic employees in the US, and increasing the number of
women engineering interns to 46 per cent.
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